logicandlanguage.net

Maybe "fehlt" means that they lacked an opinion on this question until after reading the Tractatus?

I was trying to figure out whether or not this was a joke, but it looks real enough. But having the logical positivists answer multiple-choice questions about philosophy seems like the sort of joke an academic Onion could run.

Despite the fact that our relationships, I mean Witt and me, have always been good, (with a couple of unimportant exceptions that we’ve wounded each other with forks, knives and similar philosophical stuff for expressing ourselves simply, correctly and accurately,) I’ve always had problems with his influence on others; both philosophically and characteristically.

Maturity in one field doesn’t bring maturity in others. If lovely Schlick thought of Witt as a sage, it wasn’t a bad idea for Witt to learn from Schlick’s behavior, morals and manners. Perhaps he did try, but he couldn’t!

It may sometimes really be very inspiring to see the manuscripts of those "giants on whose shoulders we stand." They did not come up with thoughts in a moment. They were not natural born philosophers.

(Warning: shameless self-promotion) One set of documents that was not included on the Pitt site that I had hopewd would be come from 1940-41. During that academic school year, Carnap, Tarski, Quine, Hempel, Goodman, and (for the fall semester only) Russell were all in residence at Harvard together. Fortunately for us, Carnap took detailed dictation notes of their semi-regular meetings, and those discussion notes are also in the Archives of Scientific Philosophy along with all the stuff mentioned in the original post. Now for the self-promotion: Paolo Mancosu (at Berkeley) and I have (more or less separately) been working on these discussion notes recently. Paolo has an article forthcoming in History and Philosophy of Logic that gives an overview of these materials, with several relatively long quotations from the most interesting parts. I am working on a translation of all the notes, which will be published by Open Court Press sometime around early 2007 (fingers crossed). These notes are also the focus of my dissertation.

Also, those Reichenbach notes on relativity theory linked to in the original post are notes from a class taught by Einstein -- the first time (I think) Einstein taught a class on the general theory of relativity was Summer term 1919, and young Hans was in the audience. (There have been plans to publish the whole notebook, but they have not come to fruition, and I'm not sure they ever will.)

Greg, if that's your idea of self-promotion you can do it all you like on this blog! After reading your comment I wondered whether you (or your forthcoming book) have any more information on why Tarski agreed with Quine on the analytic/synthetic distinction?

Checking out Paolo Mancosu's website (the article in question is not hyperlinked from there, incidentally) I discovered that he's also a co-author of Richard Zach. Small world...

He's not just Richard's coauthor, but also his advisor! (Along with Jack Silver.) Paolo is also the professor for the logic class I'm currently a TA for.

Smaller and smaller...

The 1940-41 Harvard discussion notes don't reveal much about why Tarski criticizes the analytic/ synthetic distinction that isn't already in "On the Concept of Logical Consequence" or his "Letter to Morton White" that appeared in J. Phil. in (I think) 1987. The one truly new argument takes Godel's first incompleteness theorem as its starting point; I won't spell out the details here, but you can e-mail me if you want the ~10 pages of my dissertation draft on it. (I can use all the help I can get!)

Another related historical fact that emerges from the notes is that Tarski criticises the analytic/ synthetic distinction more often, more spiritedly, and at greater length than Quine does in 1940-41. Quine had not yet decided that synonymy is a fundamentally suspect notion -- he is still willing to allow the definition of analytic truths as sentences transformable into logical truths via the substitution of synonyms for synonyms.

Tarski's 1944 letter to White is here for the curious with J-stor access. It's very hard to believe that the author would have wanted the letter to be published; it says such harsh things about Felix Kaufmann at the bottom of page 2! (Though, to be fair, Kaufmann (1895-1949) had been dead many decades when the letter was finally published. (1987))